With cities increasing in size and density, urban parking today in the United States has become a $23 billion dollar industry. The reason for this is simple—parking in dense metropolitan areas is difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. Not only is searching for a vacant—let alone convenient—parking space frustrating for the driver, it is often linked to many additional problems negatively affecting the quality of urban life. For example, the absence of available parking accounts for approximately forty percent of the congestion associated with city driving—contributing to air pollution, driving hazards, and a higher cost of living for city dwellers. For these reasons, parking assets have become a valuable commodity and a source of revenue for city governments, businesses, and owners. Indeed, urban designers now recognize that a well-planned, convenient, and safe parking plan may increase a building's value by fifteen to forty percent in a metropolitan setting. Thus, parking asset owners are beginning to treat their parking facilities as the front doors to their property—the de facto first and last impression on patrons.
In an attempt to allocate parking commodities and reap their potential benefits, cities develop and enforce parking policies aimed at balancing the needs of residents, employers, merchants, and visitors. Traditionally, these parking policies involved a parking consumer spending a fixed amount of money on a parking space for a specified time period, without regard to the location, time of day, or total time spent using the parking space. Thus, the average parking experience required a parking consumer to pay the same price as everyone else, irrespective of whether that parking consumer had the best parking space or the worst.
Over the last few years, major metropolitans have initiated “smart” parking systems in order to reduce parking shortages, raise revenue, and improve urban livability by using sensors, smart phones, and credit cards. However, common problems with “smart” parking systems are that they remain static and do not manage individual parking spaces in “real-time.” Thus, changing conditions such as demand, time of day, availability, and the special needs or characteristics of a particular parking consumer are not taken into account. Consequently, a parking consumer pays the same price for an inconveniently located parking space as another parking consumer pays for a premium location. Such parking practices discourage rapid turnover of premium parking spaces, increase cruising and carbon emissions while searching for a conveniently located parking space, and disregards a valuable revenue scheme. Another disadvantage is that such systems require an attendant to monitor groups of parking spaces and initiate penalties—often in the form of parking tickets—to discourage parking policy violations. Thus, costs of enforcement and penalties are added burdens for parking consumers that visit, live, and work in large cities.
Thus, a desire remains to develop a green parking system that manages individual parking spaces in real-time and therefore adapts to constantly changing conditions and market demands to provide parking consumers a choice in premium parking to encourage rapid turnover and reduce carbon emissions.